Vanishing Roads and Other Essays eBook

With the elimination of editorial individuality necessarily
follows elimination of individuality in the magazine.
More and more, every day, magazines are conforming
to the same monotonous type; so that, except for name
and cover, it is impossible to tell one magazine from
another. Happily one or two—­rari
nantes in gurgito vasto—­survive amid
the democratic welter; and all who have at heart not
only the interests of literature, but the true interests
of the public taste, will pray that they will have
the courage to maintain their distinction, unseduced
by the moneyed voice of the mob—­a distinction
to which, after all, they have owed, and will continue
to owe, their success. The names of these magazines
will readily occur to the reader, and, as they occur,
he cannot but reflect that it was just editorial individuality
and a high standard of policy that made them what
they are, and what, it is ardently to be hoped, they
will still continue to be. Plutus and Demos are
the worst possible editors for a magazine; and in the
end, even, it is the best magazine that always makes
the most money.

XII

THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN

I often think, as I sit here in my green office in
the woodland—­too often diverted from some
serious literary business with the moon or the morning
stars, or a red squirrel who is the familiar spirit
of my wood-pile, or having my thoughts carried out
to sea by the river which runs so freshly and so truantly,
with so strong a current of temptation, a hundred
yards away from my window—­I often think
that the strong necessity that compelled me to do
my work, to ply my pen and inkpot out here in the
leafy, blue-eyed wilderness, instead of doing it by
typewriter in some forty-two-storey building in the
city, is one of those encouraging signs of the times
which links one with the great brotherhood of men
and women that have heard the call of the great god
Pan, as he sits by the river—­

And I go on thinking to this effect: that this
impulse that has come to so many of us, and has, incidentally,
wrought such a harmony in our lives, is something
more than duck-shooting, trout-fishing, butterfly-collecting,
or a sentimental passion for sunsets, but is indeed
something not so very far removed from religion, romantic
religion. At all events, it is something that
makes us happy, and keeps us straight. That combination
of results can only come by the satisfaction of the
undeniable religious instinct in all of us: an
instinct that seeks goodness, but seeks happiness too.
Now, there are creeds by which you can be good without
being happy; and creeds by which you can be happy
without being good. But, perhaps, there is only
one creed by which you can be both at once—­the
creed of the growing grass, and the blue sky and the
running river, the creed of the dog-wood and the skunk-cabbage,
the creed of the red-wing and the blue heron—­the
creed of the great god Pan.